Old Song, Story of Modern Culture, Part 2

In the early 1940s, the New York folk scene was incubating as
musicians black and white gathered at each other’s apartments to
share songs.

Most of them, more than being musicians, were popularizers.
Though Woody Guthrie came straight from small-town Oklahoma, his
strength was as a showman, bringing white regional experience — via
his own songs and others’ — into a radio and phonograph world.
Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, a former prisoner from Louisiana,
and Josh White, who grew up touring with black musicians in the
1920s, were helping to make “race music” more mainstream.

Into this mix, Lomax brought “The Rising Sun Blues.” Some
might have already heard of it distantly, but he deposited it onto
their musical doorstep.

White, especially, took to the song. His intense, minor-key
version, with the first melody that resembles the one familiar
today, introduced a black bluesman’s sensibility that entranced an
audience different from Guthrie’s. (Though Lomax said he taught
White the arrangement, White later said he learned it from a
“white hillbilly” in North Carolina.)

Roots music was popping up everywhere. Lead Belly sent
“Goodnight, Irene” on its way. Aaron Copland adapted fiddler W.H.
Stepp’s version of “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Seeger, with his new
group, the Weavers, turned to Africa for the melodic “Wimoweh,”
which became the foundation for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

So it was with “Rising Sun,” which, with the Weavers’ help,
became a standard during the folk revival of the 1950s and early
1960s. Clarence Ashley, meanwhile, was still singing his old-timey
version and teaching it to guitar picker Doc Watson. Each musician
brought a new interpretation, a new sensibility.

Then, in 1961, a skinny 20-year-old Woody Guthrie fan from
Minnesota took a turn with the song. His musician friend Dave Van
Ronk had arranged a haunting version, and the singer decided
“House of the Risin’ Sun” would be a memorable part of his debut
album.

It turned out Bob Dylan was right.

A Hit Brewing in England

Across the Atlantic, in the coal town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
England, an electrical worker’s son named Eric Burdon had immersed
himself in blues and folk. He especially liked a local singer named
Johnny Handel, who sang of shipwrecks and local mining disasters
and favored a tune making the rounds called “House of the Rising
Sun.”

As Burdon’s fledgling musical group, the Animals, came together,
he and bandmate Alan Price heard others singing it; Dylan and Josh
White made deep impressions. So in 1964, when Chuck Berry and Jerry
Lee Lewis came to Britain on tour and the Animals wanted in, the
song seemed an ideal solution.

“I realized one thing: You can’t out-rock Chuck Berry,” says
Burdon, playing air guitar as he reminisces in New Orleans, which
he visits frequently. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we take this song,
reorganize it, drop some of Dylan’s lyrics and get Alan Price to
rearrange it?’”

Through musicians like Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and
Mary, the music of the folk revival had begun to be a real force in
pop and rock. And the Animals were more than willing to
participate.

Their version began with Hilton Valentine’s now-famous guitar
riff. Then Burdon’s ragged voice began spitting out lyrics almost
resentfully before the organ music kicked in. It was a throbbing,
uniquely 1960s anthem.

The band joined the tour and ended the song with a lone red
light bathing Burdon. The audience went nuts, and the Animals went
straight to the recording studio. Their electric version of Georgia
Turner’s favorite song swept across the radio waves. On Sept. 5,
1964, “The House of the Rising Sun” displaced The Supremes’
“Where Did Our Love Go?” to become Billboard’s No. 1.

Jazz, Punk, and German Tango

From there it went everywhere.

Through the decades, artist after artist claimed it and reshaped
it: Disco. Country rock. Jazz. Punk. Cajun. Elevator music. Even
German tango and harmonica renditions. A band called Frijid Pink
recorded a version that a young serviceman named Gillis Turner grew
to love while serving in Vietnam, and had no idea it was connected
to his Aunt Georgia.

“I think that everybody who’s had a bad day can relate to that
song,” he says.

It was even appropriated into hip-hop, a genre that relies upon
the reinterpretation of music that came before. When Wyclef Jean
used the melody of “House of the Rising Sun” and added Haitian
lyrics, Georgia Turner’s old song was enlisted once again — to
lament racism and police brutality in New York City in 1998.

“When you delve into it, you realize how pervasive traditional
songs are in our culture,” says Peggy Bulger, director of the
American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. “They’re so
much a part of us, but we don’t even recognize it.”

Voices from the Past

Sunday churchgoers are finishing lunch as a friendly 59-year-old
named Reno Taylor sits in a diner in Monroe, Mich., a pugnacious
Detroit satellite town. He is discussing his mother, Georgia
Turner, who died of emphysema in 1969 after 48 years of life.

He remembers her talking of hard times down in Kentucky and how
they coped. “They sang,” he says, “and they drank.”

But her eldest son has not come only to reminisce; he has come
to hear his mother sing.

Her voice is preserved on that old Lomax acetate disc in a
climate-controlled Library of Congress archive, and the library has
copied it onto a cassette, which sits on the table, next to the
ketchup, in a handheld recorder. “Play” is pushed.

“There is a house in New Orleans …”

Taylor tries to remain impassive. But this is, after all, the
voice of his mother, dead 31 years. And here she is as a girl,
singing the blues before life had dealt her so many reasons to do
so.

“My mother she’s a tailor …”

Taylor’s eyes betray nothing. He sits ramrod straight,
contemplating.

“My sweetheart he’s a drunkard, Lord, Lord …”

Then his cheek muscles twitch. The hint of a smile dawns. It
can’t hold itself in.

“One foot is on the platform …”

Sure, Georgia Turner is gone and buried, but for a
fleeting instant she is present in the Monroe Diner, serenading her
son on magnetic tape.

Georgia Turner ‘Did Good’

He never knew about the “Rising Sun” connection; he was in the
service when Lomax tracked her down in 1963 and began sending what
royalties there were. By then, Lomax told her, the song had been
“pirated.” Taylor’s sister, Faye, has kept the stubs from the few
checks that came — $117.50 total, hardly enough to help support 10
children.

Taylor wishes she’d gotten enough to buy better medical
treatment. “It would be so nice,” he says, “if she did get some
recognition for something she did good.”

She did do good, it seems. Her favorite song is a ringing tone
for a mobile phone in Hong Kong. It’s background music in a Thai
restaurant in Keene, N.H., and in a hotel in Nanchang, China — and
how many places in between? On the Internet, musicians upload their
own “Rising Suns”; a few weeks ago, Gillis Turner’s daughter
downloaded the Frijid Pink version he so loved in Vietnam.

Why this song? Who knows? Georgia Turner didn’t create it, but
she sang it and it soared. Up from the folkways, onto the highways
and beyond.

On the Internet, a computer-generated “House of the Rising
Sun” file is credited this way: “By everyone.” And that’s it
exactly. Each time a song moves from new mouth to fresh ear, it
carries its past along.

If you listen just right, you can hear the chorus that came
before. Clarence Ashley and Roy Acuff and Doc Watson are singing;
so are Woody Guthrie and Josh White and Lead Belly, each long gone.
The Weavers are harmonizing. Eric Burdon is belting out his best.
Germany’s Toots Thielemans is manning the mundharmonika.

And you can hear, too, the miner’s daughter from Middlesboro who
never asked for much and never got much in return. Georgia Turner,
dead and silent 31 years, is still singing the blues away.